We’re pretty happy with SVN right now, but Joel’s tutorial intrigued me. So I was wondering – would it be feasible in our situation too?
The thing is – our SVN repository is HUGE. The software itself has a 15 years old legacy and has survived several different source control systems already. There are over 68,000 revisions (changesets), the source itself takes up over 100MB and I cant even begin to guess how many GB the whole repository consumes.
The problem then is simple – a clone of the whole repository would probably take ages to make, and would consume far more space on the drive that is remotely sane. And since the very point of distributed version control is to have a as many repositories as needed, I’m starting to get doubts.
How does Mercurial (or any other distributed version control) deal with this? Or are they unusable for such huge projects?
Added: To clarify – the whole thing is one monolithic beast of a project which compiles to a single .EXE and cannot be split up.
Added 2: Second thought – The Linux kernel repository uses git and is probably an order of magnitude or two bigger than mine. So how do they make it work?
100MB of source code is less than the Linux kernel. Changelog between Linux kernel 2.6.33 and 2.6.34-rc1 has 6604 commits. Your repository scale doesn’t sound intimidating to me.
Twice as much, but still peanuts with the big hard drives we all have.